A FinFET is a transistor built around a thin strip of semiconductor material (generally referred to as the fin) that extends from an underlying substrate. This fin-shaped semiconductor element acts as the channel region of the device. The transistor includes the standard field-effect transistor (FET) nodes, including a gate, a gate dielectric, a source region, and a drain region. The conductive channel of the transistor effectively resides on sides of the fin beneath the gate dielectric. Specifically, current runs along/within both sidewalls of the fin (i.e., on sides perpendicular to the underlying substrate surface) as well as along the top of the fin (i.e., on a side parallel to the underlying substrate surface). Because the conductive channel of such configurations essentially resides along the three different outer, planar regions of the fin, such a FinFET design is sometimes referred to as a tri-gate transistor. Other types of FinFET configurations are also available, such as so-called double-gate FinFETs, in which the conductive channel principally resides only along the two sidewalls of the fin (and not along the top of the fin). A nanowire transistor, sometimes referred to as a gate-all-around transistor, is effectively a fin that has a relatively low aspect ratio because some underlying portion of the fin is removed so that the gate stack material can surround the channel region on all sides.